How can trade safeguard food security, globally and nationally?

Nearly a quarter of the food grown for people crosses a border before it is eaten. Trade moves food from surplus to deficit regions, but it also spreads shocks such as harvest failures, wars and export bans; how can the first benefit be kept without the second risk?

Question

How can international trade be used to safeguard food security at both global and national levels? This covers the benefits of trade for food supply, the risks of depending on few suppliers and of export bans in crises, and the policies, reserves and diversification that make trade a buffer rather than a channel for shocks.

Background

The question is in the theme "exploring economic opportunities and addressing social challenges" of the 100 essential questions for the future of agriculture, compiled from 419 questions submitted worldwide in 2022. The authors stress that food security also requires overcoming the social and economic barriers to accessing nutritious food [1].

What is known

• Between 1986 and 2009 the food calories traded internationally more than doubled and the number of trade links grew by more than 50%; about 23% of the food produced for people is traded internationally [2].
• From 1992 to 2009 the number of wheat and rice trade connections doubled; 85% of countries had low or marginal food self-sufficiency, and simulated production shocks caused larger import losses for least developed countries as the network became more connected [3].
• Between 1987 and 2013, trade increased the diversity of food supply for most people but also their dependence on imports, while countries' numbers of import partners fell more often than they rose [4].
• A multilayer network model of 125 food products in 192 countries and territories estimated that losing all of Ukraine's agricultural production would cut supplies in some countries by up to 89% for sunflower oil and 85% for maize, and by up to 25% for poultry meat through indirect effects [5].

What would count as progress

No single result settles a question like this; contributions like these would move it forward:

• Open, regularly updated datasets of bilateral food trade, stocks and export restrictions, linked to food-price and food-security indicators.
• Models of shock propagation tested against observed events, such as the 2008 and 2022 price spikes, and then used to compare policies such as reserves or rules on export bans.
• Country-level analyses of the balance between domestic production and imports that gives resilience at acceptable cost.

References

1. Hu, Y. et al. (2023). 100 essential questions for the future of agriculture. Modern Agriculture 1(1), 4–12.
2. D'Odorico, P. et al. (2014). Feeding humanity through global food trade. Earth's Future 2(9), 458–469.
3. Puma, M. J. et al. (2015). Assessing the evolving fragility of the global food system. Environmental Research Letters 10(2), 024007.
4. Kummu, M. et al. (2020). Interplay of trade and food system resilience: gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency. Global Food Security 24, 100360.
5. Laber, M. et al. (2023). Shock propagation from the Russia–Ukraine conflict on international multilayer food production network determines global food availability. Nature Food 4(6), 508–517.

Source

Imported from 100 essential questions for the future of agriculture, question 82, curated by Hu et al. Listed as open in the source (2023) and still an active research question as of 2026-10-20. The statement above is written in our own words; see the source for the original wording, history and discussion.